By: Phil Wahba | Link to article
A few years into her time overseeing American Eagle’s Aerie division, Jennifer Foyle felt the loungewear and intimate apparel brand needed to stake a flag in the ground to stand out in a crowded sector.
It was 2014, at the twilight of Victoria’s Secret’s cultural dominance before a consumer backlash against unrealistic supermodel-led body standards had started to hurt the lingerie brand’s sales. Aerie was ahead of its time among mass-market brands: It had leaned into body positivity before that became a mainstream term by offering larger sizes earlier than peers, and focusing on comfort and fit, rather than sexiness in service to the male gaze.
Foyle, now president and executive creative director of AE and Aerie, decided to take it a step further: Aerie announced the “Aerie Real pledge” to stop retouching photos of models, a pioneering stand in the apparel industry at the time. “I said, ‘This is it. This is our moment. We are going to be disruptive in the intimate apparel space,’” Foyle recalls in a recent interview with Fortune in an Aerie store in New York’s SoHo. “It was a magical moment when it came to life.”
Last month, Aerie launched a fresh campaign doubling down on that long-established policy of celebrating realistic beauty, with an ad mocking the limitations of AI. Featuring actor Pamela Anderson, known now as much for her no-makeup stance as for her time in the 1990’s as a Baywatch star and tabloid celebrity, the ad juxtaposes the bland lifelessness of AI-generated models with the vivacity of real women, culminating in the slogan “Real matters” and a reiteration of the brand’s pledge, with an addition: “No AI generated bodies or people.”
“Aerie Real was just celebrating women for who they are,” says Foyle, “and so now we are going to go to the next level with it.”
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